Hemingway's tips

Ernest Hemingway (Public Domain Image)

Some people find writing easy. They just sit down and write, work until they're finished, and turn out a first draft that is so good that it's their final draft.

Perhaps in college, you know or knew someone who could write such perfect term papers that they had a "term-paper-writing" business.

They were so good they could put out  term papers the night before the assignment was due. Other students "hired" them to write their papers.

And many people know the story of how Jack Kerouac wrote his novel On the Road--composing it in fourteen days and typing it on a role of Teletype paper to avoid changing pages. However, this type of ease in writing is rare.

Most people--whether they are students writing papers, teachers researching articles, journalists assembling news stories, business people composing memos, or novelists--find writing hard work.

But writing is also opportunity. It allows you to express something about yourself, to explore and explain ideas, and to assess the claims of other people. By formulating and organizing ideas, and finding the right words to present them, you gain power.

At times the task may seem overwhelming, but the rewards make the hard work worthwhile. As you come to see writing positively, as an opportunity for communication, you will develop the confidence you need to overcome its occasional frustrations.

You can gain this confidence by writing and learning from your own work and that of others. Experienced writers are one source of lessons that you may find helpful. Consider what Ernest Hemingway says about his early writing experiences in Paris in the 1920s.

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what as going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going , I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. I was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline. (Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast)

With that in mind, let's draw some key pointers for consideration:

1. Develop writing habits that work for you and trust in them.
2. Understand the stages of the writing process.
3. Rely on three basic elements--subject, audience, and purpose--to guide you.